Space-times of Exile: Mobility, Temporality, and Place-making among Kurdish and Left-wing Political Refugees from Turkey in Greece

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Kurdish and left-wing political refugees from Turkey and North Kurdistan (Eastern and Southeastern Turkey) in Greece between 2020 and 2022, this dissertation addresses questions of space and time in political exile as a lived experience of displacement/emplacement. Since the 1980s, Greece has been one of the first countries where populations from Turkey/N.Kurdistan fleeing war, political violence, and persecution due to their minoritized political identities and struggles seek safety. Most of the refugees have considered Greece to be a transit space, a threshold on the way to Western European countries which host large Turkish and Kurdish diasporas and offer better socioeconomic opportunities. In the period since 2015, when the peace negotiations between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish state were broken, and since 2016, when authoritarianism and oppression of political oppositions in Turkey reached a historical peak, tens of thousands of people have fled abroad. This period has also been represented as a “refugee crises” in Europe. It has included violence at the EU’s borders, the erosion of the right to asylum, and a containment of unwanted racialized migrants/refugees in the margins of Europe. In Greece, these people have been subjected to systematic incarceration and socioeconomic marginalization. This dissertation studies how the exiles’ collective and embodied past knowledge and experiences of violence, resistance, and communality in Turkey/N.Kurdistan have shaped their lives under their new conditions in Greece. In particular, it focuses on the exiles’ affective and analytical engagement with the physical and social spaces they inhabit, move through, get stuck in, and co-produce through memory, resistance, sociality, and political rituals. The chapters discuss the exiles’ lived experiences of historical traces of forced migration in space, carceral resistance in migrant/refugee prisons, waiting and “presentlessness,” embodied space and movement in the city, and political movement and “revolutionary time.” The dissertation argues that the liminality of exile allows people to simultaneously inhabit several spaces and temporalities. It conceptualizes exile as a threshold, where past and present space-times become superimposed, intimately connected, and vigorously present. This allows the exiles to use their past knowledge and experiences to reorient themselves, act politically, form new spatial and social attachments, relationships of care, and political alliances, and partially emplace themselves in the transitional spaces of exile through references to the space-times lost and left behind.